


broken heart since the day i learnt to speak

by ilgaksu



Series: shut your mouth, baby (stand and deliver) [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Bandits & Outlaws, Keith (Voltron) Has Abandonment Issues, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Wild West
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 21:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20316019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: Keith Kogane is gone sixteen when his mother walks into the desert and never comes back. She kisses him on the cheek, the scrub of her chapped lips against his skin, and she says, “You stay put, Junior. You stay put right here for me for the next three days. And if I don’t come back, you get going, you get gone. Promise me.”So he promises, because what else is he meant to do?





	broken heart since the day i learnt to speak

Keith Kogane is gone sixteen when his mother walks into the desert and never comes back. She kisses him on the cheek, the scrub of her chapped lips against his skin, and she says, “You stay put, Junior. You stay put right here for me for the next three days. And if I don’t come back, you get going, you get gone. Promise me.” 

So he promises, because what else is he meant to do? What else can he do, with her pinning him right through with her eyes? Then she strikes out against the sunset, her silhouette cut out of the sky itself, and is gone. 

After the fourth day, the rest of the gang go from subtly shifting and muttering amongst themselves whilst they think Keith is asleep to outright mutiny. Keith holds his father’s pistol steady as threading a needle and shoots one of them through the eye easy as knocking a bottle down. By the fifth day, two other men are dead, the rest have fled and Keith is eating out of the dead men’s belongings, chewing beef jerky and stale bread. He keeps his eyes stuck on that sunset, the one that she melted into it and is going to slip back out of any hour now, he just knows it.

He runs out of water a week later. 

*

Four years later, Lance McClain kicks his feet up onto a table and says, “How’d you know all this again?” 

They’re in a saloon. They’re always in a saloon. The last few weeks, it’s taken Lance longer and longer to sidle off with a girl, hands already picking at the lacing in her corset. He’s kept sat here instead, and Keith’s stayed by his side, telling himself it’s on account of how needling him’s free and easy entertainment. 

“I just know it,” Keith says, feels the line of his mouth smoothing out into a smirk when he adds, “I was born knowing it.” 

Lance rolls his eyes at him and Keith just shrugs, pleased.

“You really believe that?” he asks, eventually, so quiet that Keith could be excused if he missed it entirely. He doesn’t miss it, though, and he doesn’t miss how the fold of Lance’s arms across his chest has gone all tense and knife-crisp. Keith tears his eyes away from the strain of the tendons in Lance’s neck and says, “Believe in what now?” 

Lance huffs out a breath, all annoyance. His eyes slide over the room, the weight of them a tug. Keith sees them get stuck on the bartender’s hands where he’s cleaning glasses. No fucking subtlety, he thinks, and opens his mouth to drop something scathing about it on the table - for all his playacting, Lance McClain is as open a book as the Bible and it’s going to cause an almighty racket one of these days - but Lance beats him to it, picking up their topic like fallen thread. 

“Are you honest to God one of those out there believing in destiny?” he asks. “You know, guardian angels? A star picked out for you? The Lord is my Shepherd and I shall not want? All that -”

“I don’t know,” Keith interrupts him, not liking the way this is turning. He catches the surprise opening up on Lance’s face and he scowls. It stings and he can’t get it clear in his head why. “I don’t _ know, _ alright? I just don’t see why not.”

“You just don’t see why not.” 

“I don’t hardly know about the world. Stands to reason I’d know less about the purpose of it.” 

“Huh.” 

“Some things are just in your bones,” Keith says, his mouth opening around the echo of the memory. He learnt to shoot at gun at eight years old, empty bottles lined up on fences, his mother’s voice in his ear and his father’s hand steadying his on the trigger._ There, would you look at that. You’re taking to it just like you did to breathing, just like the day your mama bore you. _

_ ‘Course he is. ‘Course you are. Some things are just in your bones, Junior. _

“No, nah, you see, you know what was in my bones?” Lance takes another swig from his bottle. His mouth comes away wet. “My parents wanted me to be a fucking bookkeeper. I heard them talking about it, one night, about getting me to take one of those correspondence courses and get an accounting license.” 

“Sure,” Keith says, because he doesn’t know what in the hell he’s meant to say to that. _ Congratulations? _

“I don’t think I wanted to be an accountant,” Lance tells him, “Who you’re meant to be doesn’t mean shit.”

*

Shiro had found a sixteen-year-old Keith collapsed halfway back out of the desert, a bare mile from the nearest town, face-down in the dirt but unable to sink down into it entirely and sleep. It had taken him another day out there before his thirst had sent him scrambling for his life, but he’d been too stubborn all the same. Keith heard the approaching horse and stayed put, not able to move even if he wanted, all his soul sapped out of him and into the ground, fleeing back to the desert and his mother. 

“Jesus Christ, are you alive?” Shiro had said, turning Keith over, frowning. The white in his hair made a blinding halo against the high morning sun, his eyes dark and his shadow cool and Keith had coughed in his face and then thought: _ so this is it. This is what dying’s like. All the preachers were right all along, and maybe I should’ve listened to them. This angel isn’t going to stick around by my side that long. Any moment now. Any moment now, he’s just gonna get up and - _

When Shiro did get up, brushing the dirt off his knees and stepping out of Keith’s eyeline, Keith had sighed, confirmation settling on him like a cloud. He hadn’t wanted to be proven right, but there it was, then. He’d closed his eyes again and waited for the downstairs lot to come get him. 

But then, there was an arm hauling him up out of his grave, pressing the lip of a waterskin to his mouth and flooding it. Keith had coughed, swallowed, coughed more, the cold liquid washing down his front and out of his mouth. He’d licked his lips desperately, chasing more, grabbed the waterskin with the ferocity of a man drowning only in reverse.

“Easy, now,” Shiro had said, before he became Shiro, before he became Keith’s late-night confidant and the hinge his whole world would revolve on forever after. “Take it easy. You’ll make yourself sick.” 

There’s a reason men coming back from the dead only happens in the Bible: being alive hurts, all sun and grit and pain and thirst. The Lazarus trick burns. Keith drinks all of Shiro’s water, eats half of his bread, and it takes him three weeks to stop believing Shiro is an angel. The fact he’s plain human, like Keith in substance but not in sentiment, only makes it more miraculous. 

*

Keith Kogane is gone twenty when he walks to the edge of the railroad tunnel and peers over. Pidge is crouched there, doesn’t acknowledge him, too busy owlishly checking her pocketwatch and squinting out into the surrounding skyline. 

“Alright,” Lance is saying to the others, “Wait for Keith. We’re waiting on his signal, remember? It’s not until the smoke comes out of the windows we’re riding down into the valley itself.”

Keith tests the satchel strapped to his back, hearing the faint clink of the smoke-bombs Hunk had pulled together out of saltpeter and table sugar as they shift together inside. It holds just fine. He knows since he’s checked twice already, but a third time won’t have hurt it. He looks out at the valley, the Galra Corporation’s new railway line bisecting it, asymmetrical iron that throws off the whole landscape for the sake of gain, and he sighs. 

“Ready, Keith?” Pidge asks, standing up, tucking the pocket watch back into her jacket. “They’re due out of the tunnel in the next four minutes.”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Keith replies. She snorts. 

“I’ll take it,” she says, and heads back towards the others. Keith moves into position, hovering at the lip of the tunnel, just above where the train will shortly exit. He feels rather than sees Lance approach him. 

“I’m ready,” he says, clipped. He pulls his bandana up to just below his eyes. 

Lance doesn’t reply, just stands there. He gazes out at the valley too. Keith wonders what it is he sees: opportunity? Solution? It’s been less than a month since he threw a knife at him in some kind of audition. He’s getting a sense of what dragged Lance out of his fancy settled life to be here, but it’s all piecemeal, and everyone’s told him not to ask Lance too many questions about his family. He’s also getting a sense that it matters to him - Lance’s motivations matter to him - in a way he doesn’t like. 

All Keith sees is how he’s ended up right back where he started. Still, despite everything, his parents’ son. Inescapably. Some things are just in your bones. 

By now, they can hear the train thundering beneath them, distant but the sound’s rising heavy as the sun: he feels the whole gang grow silent in the wake of it. The cicadas scream in the distance. When Keith licks his lips, he can taste salt. 

“One minute,” Pidge calls. Keith tenses. 

_ Fuck destiny, _ he thinks. It’s the last thing he’s thinking when the train rushes out of the tunnel, rattling the tracks below it. One breath in, one breath out: Keith jumps right down onto it, feet sliding for purchase, eyes smarting wet from the wind, hair flying. His teeth chatter. But he’s alive. He’s always still alive. It takes a matter of minutes to swing down into a compartment, smashing the window in with his booted feet. 

_ I don’t think I wanted to be an accountant, _ Lance had said - like he’d known he wouldn’t have had any say in the matter. 

Keith is gone twenty, standing in a moving train, surrounded by shocked passengers. His feet dirty a nice white tablecloth. Fuck. He’d misjudged it. He’s in the dining car. Fuck. No time to hesitate now. 

_ Fuck destiny. _

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, yanking both the pistols out of their holsters and raising them to the ceiling.

He shoots out of the broken window, just once, just so they hear the sound and know they’re serious. A few people scream, a faint tinny noise at the back of his head, background noise to his mind furiously adjusting their plans, because _ fuck destiny, _ fuck those sixteen days in the desert, fuck Shiro for saving him like it was a kindness _ . _ Fuck Lance McClain and how half of what he says sticks rattling around in Keith’s damn head like something’s gotten loose in there. Fuck all of it. 

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Keith says, rote as reading from a prayerbook, a walking legacy. _ You’re taking to it, Junior. _“Everyone down on the ground, if you please. This is a robbery.” 


End file.
